Burndown Chart: What Is It and How Do You Create One?

Project and task management require a lot of organization, and project management charts are a great way to keep track of a project. One useful project management chart is a burndown chart.

A burndown chart is a handy tool that showcases how much work has been completed in a project or a sprint compared to how much work needs to get done to hit the timeline. This visualizes your team’s progress, helping (a) keep them accountable and (b) motivate them to keep the pace and finish the project.

Here’s a short selection of 6 easy-to-edit burndown chart templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:

Throughout this article, we’ll talk a bit more about what a burndown chart is, what goes into one, why you might want to use one and how to create your own burndown chart.

Table of Contents

What is a Burndown Chart?

Elements of a Burndown Chart

What Are the Benefits of a Burndown Chart?

How to Create a Burndown Chart

What is a Burndown Chart?

A burndown chart is a graphical representation of a project’s timeline and the amount of work being completed. It helps teams to see if they’re on track or need to pick up the pace (or perhaps take on less work in the future).

Here’s an example of what a burndown chart might look like:

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

It’s always going to be two lines, comparing the ideal amount of work that needs to be done versus the actual amount of work getting done.

If your burndown chart showcases that the amount of tasks left is much higher than the ideal timeline, you may need to adjust your scope creep. It also may mean that some of your teammates bit off more than they could chew and need to reassess their bandwidth for future projects.

Elements of a Burndown Chart

A burndown chart is actually extremely simple and only includes a couple of elements.

• Your x-axis should include the timeline of your projects (i.e., two weeks, three months) broken down into weekly or daily increments
• Your y-axis represents the amount of completed tasks or time spent on the project, either as a percentage, hours or number of tasks
• One line represents your ideal trajectory and is often visualized as a straight line at a downward angle
• The other line represents the actual percentage of tasks that have been completed and is updated each day to give an accurate idea of the remaining workload

The actual work line may fluctuate depending on any blockers or issues that come up throughout the project, but should hopefully end up in the same place as the ideal work line.

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

What Are the Benefits of a Burndown Chart?

A burndown chart has many unique benefits for your team:

• Get the full scope of the project, giving you and your team a realistic idea of how long things will take.
• Be aware early if it looks like your team may be struggling to hit the deadline.
• Keep everyone up-to-date on the status of your project.
• Have an immediate answer when superiors ask about the status of your project.
• Motivate your team to keep the pace necessary to keep your project on track.

Plus, if you create a burndown chart with a tool like Visme, you can provide a shareable link with each person on your team that automatically updates each time you input a new day’s data points.

This makes it easy to keep your entire team regularly updated with a burndown chart like the one below:

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

How to Create a Burndown Chart

Ready to create your own burndown chart? You can easily put together a burndown chart that monitors progress using our DIY design and visual communication tool.

Just follow along with these quick steps and you’ll be on your way to visualizing your next project’s progress.

Step 1: Start With a Template

It’s always easier to create something when you have a great starting point—like a premade template! We have a handful of burndown chart templates to get you started so you don’t have to worry about the design—just inputting your numbers.

Use a template like this one below for your burndown chart:

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

Step 2: Gather Your Data

There are three main data sets you’ll need to gather to create your burndown chart.

• Your project’s timeline: How long is your project going to take? In this example, we’ll do two weeks, or 14 days, similar to a standard agile sprint.
• Your estimated effort: This could be your task load, the number of hours you plan to dedicate to the project, or a percentage of work left. In this example, we’ll do 80 hours across the two-week timeline.
• Your daily progress: You’ll start by matching this to the estimated effort, then pop in at the end of each day to update how many hours were actually spent on the project.

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Step 3: Plot Your Points

Click the chart in the Visme editor to open up the spreadsheet. If you already have your data in a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet, you can import that. Public Google Sheets can be connected so that your burndown chart updates automatically whenever you update your data in the spreadsheet.

Or, you can simply input your data into the built-in spreadsheet like so:

At first, your actual effort can just match the ideal effort. Then you’ll go in each day and update with how many hours you actually have remaining until the project is complete.

In our example, we’re estimating about 80 hours over the next two weeks. Spread out across several team members; they should easily be able to get eight or more collective hours of work done on the project—as long as nothing else comes up.

However, sometimes there are roadblocks. Or, on the other hand, there could be more productive days. So, in the end, you might end up with something that looks like this:

Your chart would reflect this like so:

The parts where your actual effort line is below the ideal effort mean your team is working more productively than you expected. Any time the line starts to creep above the ideal effort line, it means your team is starting to get behind.

Keep an eye on this each day to see where you might need to assist your team in making sure the project gets completed on time.

Pro Tip: Go into your chart settings and select the “Line” graph type under the “Appearance” tab to get straight lines instead of curved lines in your burndown chart.

Step 4: Customize Your Burndown Chart

Although you’re always welcome to keep the template as is, you may want to customize it to fit your team or match your brand colors.

Customization options within Visme include:

• Adding or editing the title to reflect the project’s name
• Changing fonts and colors to match your branding—especially if you have your brand kit imported into Visme

• Update the colors of your line graph to match your brand
• Add a photo with a color overlay to the background of your chart, or change the background to a solid color or gradient
• Drag and drop animated illustrations, icons, stock photos and more onto your burndown chart

Step 5: Share Your Burndown Chart

Finally, you’ll want to share your burndown chart with your team. There are a few ways to do this. First, you can publish it and get a public link. However, if you only want this to be shared with your team, you can restrict access to specific people and share a private link.

Or, you can also embed it on an internal website so everyone on your team can access it.

There are also several ways to download your chart, but if you want a dynamic burndown chart that automatically reflects your updates, you’ll want to share via link.

Create Your Own Burndown Chart Today

Get started creating your own burndown chart with Visme. With extensive chart and graph options, you can visualize your project management in any way you want, whether it’s with a burndown chart, Gantt chart or something else entirely.

Written by Chloe West

Chloe West is the content marketing manager at Visme. Her experience in digital marketing includes everything from social media, blogging, email marketing to graphic design, strategy creation and implementation, and more. During her spare time, she enjoys exploring her home city of Charleston with her son.